5.  The applicants are all Romanian citizens.
6.  The facts, as submitted by the parties, may be summarised as follows.
7.  The applicants are all former employees of B., a bank, which was involved in a large restructuring process of State-owned companies in Romania, entailing collective dismissals.
8.  The collective dismissal of employees of B. took place in different stages between September 1998 and October 1999. It affected hundreds of persons across Romania working either in the central office or in the local branches of the bank as follows: 632 persons dismissed in September 1998, seventy persons dismissed in February 1999 and 725 persons dismissed in May 1999. No precise numbers were available for the final stages of the dismissal process. From the case file, it appears that the applicants were dismissed during the period September 1998-October 1999.
9.  The applicants made several attempts to receive compensatory sums for collective dismissal (see paragraph 14 below) before the Bucharest Employment and Vocational Training Agency (“the agency”), a State agency entrusted with the disbursement of these payments, but did not have any success.
10.  On 3 December 2000, they brought an action against the agency, seeking to be granted the compensatory payments. They argued that according to the applicable law, their right had arisen on the date on which their contracts had been terminated. The fact that B. had failed to submit to the agency a list of the persons whose contracts had been terminated could not be imputed to the employees. Moreover, there was established case-law upholding applications submitted by other former employees in a similar situation from the same court of first instance in Bucharest and in final decisions of higher courts across the country.
11.  By a judgment of 9 August 2001, Bucharest District Court upheld the applicants' claim. It established that B. had only submitted to the local agency a list of persons dismissed after 8 October 1999 and had failed to send a list of persons dismissed before that date, even though they were part of the same collective dismissal process. The court considered that this failure gave rise to inequalities among the people dismissed.
12.  Allowing an appeal by the agency, the Bucharest County Court, by a final decision of 25 March 2002 (drafted on 1st July 2002), reversed the first-instance decision and concluded that the applicants did not meet the requirements for receiving the compensatory payments. For the applicants dismissed between September 1998 and May 1999, the appellate court referred to another condition provided by the national legislation, namely that the State Property Fund (FPS) should have mandated its special representatives on the board of shareholders to proceed with the reorganisation, in particular with the collective dismissal. In the case at issue, the appellate court established that such a mandate did not exist on the date when the applicants were dismissed and therefore they were not entitled to compensatory payments. For the applicants dismissed between August and October 1999, the county court established that they did not meet another condition, namely that they did not prove that they had taken part in the pre-dismissal procedures. It concluded that the applicants did not satisfy these specific conditions and dismissed their claims.
13.  The applicants submitted requests to the Procurator General for leave to lodge an extraordinary appeal against the final decision, invoking, inter alia, the existence of conflicting final decisions concerning other former employees in the same situation as them, namely those dismissed before October 1999. Their requests were rejected.